Obstruction of Justice

by Luke Rosiak

  Kiko hadn’t denied it in person. I’d also run the allegations by the spokesman repeatedly before publishing and he said it was not possible for him to discuss it no matter what. The most charitable explanation for Kiko’s meek conduct in this investigation was his sense of propriety and bureaucratic caution. What had changed now that meant he could violate his own “no discussing an ongoing investigation or internal matters” policy? It seemed obvious: he’d been threatened again.

  But I figured there was no way he’d actually release a statement. He’d have to be extraordinarily scared in order to do so, and here’s why: Kiko must have assumed one of the sources for my story to be Sean Moran, the top Republican staffer on the Administration Committee, who essentially amounted to Kiko’s supervisor. That would mean the CAO in a Republican-led Congress would be violating his own rules for the purpose of publicly calling his own Republican boss a liar, all to protect the reputation of a Democrat who had repeatedly bullied him to try to affect his handling of a misconduct case.

  But he did it.

  “At no point was I threatened or accused of any prejudice, whatsoever, by any individual over the CAO’s corrective actions in response to the activities of five shared employees subject to a pending investigation. Any assertion that I was called an ‘Islamophobe’ is false. Furthermore, I was never informed of any ‘land deal’ involving any of the individuals under investigation as falsely reported,” Weiser blasted out in a statement attributed to Kiko.

  Multiple people who had heard the story from Kiko himself independently repeated it to me word for word. It happened. But even if you didn’t have that knowledge, this hyperbolic statement was absurd.

  Representative Wasserman Schultz had been all over the media saying this was a partisan witch-hunt fueled by religious bias. And Kiko was the Republican who’d played a key role, writing the letter that kicked them off the network. She’d excoriated Kiko’s subordinate in a videotaped hearing. She’d even threatened a cop on video. Who could possibly believe that Representative Wasserman Schultz had never said privately what she implied publicly?

  Well, some people could. Suddenly, Shawn Boburg of the Washington Post, who had ignored the story as I reported on new developments, was interested again. “The administrative office for Congress rarely puts out public statements but did so today challenging a Daily Caller @lukerosiak story about Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” he tweeted. But even he had to admit something smelled suspicious here. “CAO Phil Kiko did not comment before publication but now calls key anecdotes in story ‘false,’ ” he added.

  I asked Kiko’s spokesman Weiser to comment on why he could give a statement in this instance but not others. He did not respond. Then I sent him a list of questions calling Kiko’s own conduct into question, including his attempt to abolish the inspector general’s office. Weiser said he could not comment. It was incredible that Kiko was willing to go further to protect Representative Wasserman Schultz than he was to defend himself. He was prepared to be the sacrificial lamb.

  Hours after Kiko’s statement, the DOJ filed paperwork on the Awan case saying a plea deal was set to be entered on July 3.

  Representatives Gohmert and Perry’s fatal error had been going to Jeff Sessions instead of President Trump. That night, I appeared on Lou Dobbs’ TV show on Fox News and decided to use the opportunity to send a message directly to Trump, who is known to watch the show. I pointed out how this case rendered everything the Democrats had been saying for the last two years about hacking as hypocritical: that Democrats couldn’t claim to abhor what had happened at the DNC while lying about and covering up a massive cyber breach in their own ranks. Democrats chose to allow a hack of unknown severity to continue for seven months, until after the election, sacrificing national security in an attempt to win an election. It bordered on treason.

  And there was little doubt that the FBI’s “investigation” into the case was blatantly rigged.

  Trump was watching. Soon after, he tweeted: “Our Justice Department must not let Awan & Debbie Wasserman Schultz off the hook. The Democrat I.T. scandal is a key to much of the corruption we see today. They want to make a ‘plea deal’ to hide what is on their Server. Where is Server? Really bad!”

  It was a reasonable statement to say that the DOJ shouldn’t let a cybersecurity violator plead guilty to minor bank fraud charges as part of a plea bargain. But Imran’s attorney called President Trump “that idiot” and told CNN: “It’s a major concern that the plea agreement could be off the table in the wake of the President’s tweets.”

  He should have known that Sessions would not listen to his boss.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE PROSECUTION SLEEPS

  With Imran’s exoneration virtually in place, law enforcement suddenly kicked into high gear. “The FBI wants to interview me,” Pat Sowers, a Republican IT aide I’d mentioned in a few of my earliest stories, told me. “Tom Hungar, the House general counsel, said the FBI wanted me to submit to a voluntary interview because they believed I might have information relevant to House IT matters.”

  Sowers thought the Awans had committed the cardinal sin of his profession and brought a bad name to their fellow shared employees. “Ray Charles can see that these guys broke the law. We all knew there was something not right. We knew they were committing fraud with the way that they were employed.” The problem was the congressmen who employed them knew, too, he said. He believed the security of the nation might be at risk, and that the pattern of facts was so extraordinary that it demanded attention. “Why was that laptop left in that phone booth? Who was supposed to collect it?” He was willing to do anything he could to help bring justice and order to the House and tell everything he knew.

  That’s why he declined the interview.

  “My lawyer said they should subpoena me if they want to talk,” he said. Only then could the interview be fully candid. “If the FBI interviews a staff member, someone has to be present” from Congress, like a hall monitor. In the case of Democratic IT aides, that could be someone from a member’s office who’d been protecting Imran for a decade. Who in their right mind would think that was a legitimate interview? On the other hand, “if they subpoena me and give me a list of questions, I’ll answer them,” he said. “I’m willing to say anything I’m legally allowed to, and there’s no reason for Tom Hungar to be involved. He said his role was to make sure they didn’t ask anything privileged. This seemed to contradict statements by Ryan’s office and the prosecutors that nothing was being withheld under the speech and debate clause. If nothing else, a monitor’s very presence might change what was said.

  Sowers had seen the news articles saying a plea deal was already inked. It was clear the agents weren’t interested in building a case against the Awans, and given the evidence they’d obviously gone out of their way to ignore, what possible upside was there for him? “I don’t want to implicate myself if they decide to go after me, even though I did nothing wrong,” he said. It should have sounded crazy, but it didn’t.

  It wasn’t that Sowers didn’t want to talk. “If they actually wanted to talk to me, they’d subpoena me,” he said. If not, the whole thing was some sort of joke. The subpoena never came, and the handling of the whole thing soured Sowers on Congress for good. The next day, he called the members he worked for and resigned. “I said I’m done. I’m calling it quits.”

  Theresa, the former inspector general, was in a similar position. On June 29, five days before the plea deal, she got a voicemail from Special Agent Spencer Brooks. “We need to talk to you right away. It will just be a quick phone call,” he said. Theresa didn’t immediately return the call. If the government actually wanted to know what she had to say, they’d postpone the court date a ninth time in order to speak to her. They didn’t.

  It was starting to seem like they might be planning something terrible for Theresa. After all, she’d already spoken with the FBI for five hours and the DOJ had decided to let Imran walk. So why this eleventh-hour call? I
had a theory. Representative Gohmert had raised the specter of a DOJ IG review of the handling of the case, and the FBI must have been nervous about what it might find. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act statute plainly stated that “unauthorized access” to government computers was a felony, and the server logs proved that had occurred. How could they explain their failure to file these criminal charges? They needed a fall guy. I believed that this was one final Machiavellian trick: they called Theresa knowing she’d refuse to talk to them again. Then, when someone inquired, they could say that the House’s inspector general, a key figure, had refused to cooperate; so, their hands were tied. Of course, they wouldn’t mention that she’d already spent five hours with them. In fact, this might be why they had wanted to interview her in a coffee shop instead of a government office building: the avoidance of paper trail wasn’t designed to protect her, it was designed to protect them.

  On July 2, the day before the court date, Representative Gohmert’s chief of staff, an indefatigable woman by the name of Connie Hair, got a call from Sessions’ staffer, Tucker. She confirmed the deal would be accepted by all parties the following day. Connie warned that Imran was telling people he already had three job offers back on Capitol Hill, and members feared their data was at risk. Tucker said it wasn’t up to her to make rules about who Congress can hire. But Connie knew that Congress would just say they were never convicted of anything related to their jobs. Everyone was passing the buck.

  Connie then became another person to get a last-minute visit from investigators handling a case whose outcome had already been decided. The Capitol Police showed up at Gohmert’s office. When I stopped by later, Connie told me what happened. “They asked me what documents I had. To me it seemed like they wanted to know if I had anything that was going to contradict their narrative.”

  “We asked [the police] if nothing else, why [the Awans] weren’t being charged on the obvious problems with ethics disclosure forms: the non-disclosure of income, strange LLCs, homes they owned,” Connie said. “Senior staff all have to fill out these forms, and there were gross contradictions between public bankruptcy filings and incorporation records and their ethics disclosures, year after year. Why weren’t they being charged? We would be. They said, ‘no reasonable prosecutor would bring those charges.’ ”

  Connie had heard those words before. “It was the same ridiculous thing James Comey said when he let Hillary Clinton off the hook.”

  “They said that it would be up to the Ethics Committee to make a referral. I said what about Corrine Brown,” the Florida ex-congresswoman who was in prison in part for lying on those forms? "The Awans are not employees anymore, why would it be up to the Ethics Committee to prosecute?”

  There was, of course, an equally plausible explanation for why the Capitol Police were not going after the Awans: the Awans had compromising emails from a sizable portion of the Democrats in Congress.

  Connie asked them to go through other examples of indisputable evidence and illuminate how they concluded that they were not crimes, but they refused. “They just said, ‘We looked into it and there’s nothing there.’ But then they said more information will come out in court tomorrow, that there’s going to be some interesting stuff.”

  “They said, ‘We’ve talked to a lot of people in the last two weeks.’ ” That last part, at least, was true.

  While those witnesses wondered why the FBI would bother talking to them when a plea deal was already set, Imran feared his Sharia-law wife, Sumaira, could blow up the deal at the last minute. A week before the final court date, Imran and Sumaira had an argument over the phone. Imran talked badly of Sumaira’s kids, and Sumaira lost her cool, saying she’d hunt him down. He asked how she was going to find him—he’d be in Pakistan. Sumaira told him she was going to come forward, both to me and to prosecutors.

  “And he said, ‘If you do this with evidence, I will do this, this, this to your family. I will do it in Pakistan and you will never catch me,’ ” Sumaira recounted.

  At 9 a.m. on July 3, two hours before the plea deal was set to go down, I was about to hail a taxi to the courthouse when Sumaira called me. When she woke up, there were two FBI agents outside her door, she said; Spencer Brooks and Nathan Frank. They told her they were investigating her for threats at the behest of Imran Awan. Above all else, they said, they were there to make sure she didn’t try to go to the court date, as if they feared that she would stand up and tell the judge the truth about her husband.

  In addition to outfitting her apartment with hidden cameras, Imran had been recording his calls with her, and it seemed that he’d isolated audio from her side of the arguments and told the FBI that Sumaira should be pursued for violent threats. It was hard to see how this fell within the jurisdiction of the FBI or warranted the time of two agents, and Sumaira couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She reminded the agents that Imran had tried to have her killed in Pakistan. “Yeah, she told us that before,” Brooks nodded to Frank. Let me get this straight, she thought. The FBI had taken no action when Imran made repeated “unauthorized access” of a congressional server. The FBI had not even bothered to interview a relative who attested that House electronics were being shipped to Pakistani officials. And now they didn't find it notable that a criminal suspect who was potentially wiretapping congressmen and using their information as leverage was trying to get out of it by wiretapping someone else and using that as leverage? No, the FBI's finest would simply take the information as a tip and and knock on the door of a 110-pound woman in a burka for the crime of being rude to Imran Awan.

  She showed them text messages which made clear that—though Imran was always very careful what he put into writing—it was he who was badgering her. She then retreated back into her apartment. She didn’t know what else to do, so she called me looking for advice. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t think it was my place to give it, but by now, I couldn’t help but feel like an ambassador for the America I thought I knew. Of the things she’d told me over the past months, there were certain things I felt that the FBI would not ignore.

  At 9:45 a.m., she called me back to say that she had done the deed. She’d called Special Agent Brooks and told him clearly about every one of the items we’d just gone over. That Imran made death threats against her and was blackmailing her with a sex tape. That she believed these were criminal actions and wanted to pursue charges. That Imran told her he was a “mole” in Congress and bragged about how he’d get away with it because he “knew too much.” And finally, that he’d asked Sumaira to buy gold bars and establish an LLC for him, which she understood to be an attempt at money laundering to hide assets from the FBI. Special Agent Brooks said he didn’t know all of that and thanked her for the information.

  Now there was no denying it. The FBI had shocking information straight from the person who slept next to him, and a clear request to press charges from a victim. There was still enough time for Brooks to call prosecutors and wave them off of offering the plea deal to Imran. As my taxi neared the courthouse, I figured if the Department of Justice prosecutors had any integrity, they would postpone resolving the case while they sorted out these major new revelations. They’d already delayed the court date eight times, what’s a ninth? But as I passed through the metal detectors and made my way into the courtroom, Brooks and Frank were nowhere to be seen. Apparently, preventing a key witness from going to court was more important than attending it themselves. Not only that, but prosecutor Michael Marando, the only government attorney who actually knew the facts of the case, wasn’t there either. He would never be seen again in connection with the Imran Awan case.

  Hours before the court date, court records showed that a new prosecutor was added: J.P. Cooney. Cooney didn’t look anything like what you might imagine a fearsome federal prosecutor to be. He was skinny, with a pock-marked face, a protruding Adam’s apple, and an awkward posture. Cooney had been the prosecutor in a recent high-profile political case: he led the prosecution of Democratic Senator Bob
Menendez for corruption. It resulted in a hung jury and the DOJ didn’t bother to try again.

  Needless to say, this last-minute swap meant the two sides were as uneven as Jamie and Sean, or Hadeed and Bacon. The defense would never send in a newbie one day before the big day after two years of work by someone else; why would the government? One thought came to mind: Marando’s knowledge of the case meant he had a legal obligation to identify discrepancies and push back against any false statements made by the defense. This new guy was a clean slate. It was clear he’d been assigned to the case at the last minute for one purpose: to make it go away.

  More than a year before, on the first court date, I’d followed Marando, flanked by a phalange of assistant prosecutors and FBI agents, through the courthouse hallway until they were diverted to a back elevator, into which the whole crew could barely fit. A dark-suited man emerged to tell me it was a restricted area and I could go no further. I overheard one of the agents: “Wow. I’ve done quadruple murders and they’ve never taken me up the special elevator.”

  But today, Cooney’s slight frame sitting solitary at the prosecutor’s table told you everything you needed to know about the case. The court clerk was surprised. “Anyone else coming with you?” he asked.

  “Nope, just me,” Cooney replied.

  With FBI agents Brooks and Frank absent, sitting in the back row of the spectator’s area was their junior varsity counterpart, Brandon Merriman—a stocky, tan man who looked like a washed-up jock. And for once, there were a lot of reporters in attendance; more interested in prosecutors announcing there was not a case than in investigating the evidence of fraud, and worse, on Capitol Hill.

  The judge got right to the point. Contrary to what the Capitol Police had told Connie, there would be no interesting information emerging today. The purpose was simple: to make this go away for good—and just in time for the 2018 midterm elections. “Mr. Awan, have you ever pleaded guilty before?” the judge asked.